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The City of Alexandria has been awarded funding from the U.S. Department of Transportation today for improving transit services in two major traffic corridors. The first grant, for $8.5 million, is for construction of an exclusive transitway in the median of Route 1 between Monroe Avenue and East Glebe Road. The City was also awarded a second grant of $670,000 for planning of new facilities to assist priority transit service in the Beauregard-Van Dorn Corridor. Under the second grant, these facilities could include super stops (enhanced bus stops with real time bus information, solar lighting, and other amenities) and queue-jumping lanes (dedicated lanes that buses can use to advance from a traffic signal before the rest of traffic, moving more quickly through the roadways). These features should greatly assist future high-quality transit services in both of these corridors.

The grants are part of the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) Program, established through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). This competitive program, partially developed as an economic stimulus measure, can fund any type of transportation project, including roads, freight railroads, ports, passenger railroads, or public transit.

More than 1,400 applications requesting nearly $60 billion in projects were submitted from across the country. The nearly $9 million in grants to the City of Alexandria represented 30 percent of the $30.4 million awarded to projects in the Commonwealth of Virginia.